For baseball players who were domestically drafted and developed, their draft history is never far from their record. Whether it’s Minor League Baseball’s site or Baseball-Reference.com, you can easily find the year and round in which they were drafted. Baseball America’s draft database will have the bonuses if you need it, easily searchable by year and team.
For international prospects, the information is scattered. Baseball America writes a yearly roundup of team’s signing classes that cover the top prospects who receive the biggest bonuses, but smaller signings and late bloomers can slip through the cracks for years. B-R doesn’t have any origin information, while MiLB buries the information in its transactions section.
In preparing for 2021’s Prospect Week, I finally decided to centralize the information for myself, and pass along the product to Sox Machine supporters. Below, you’ll see a chart that covers the main signings since Marco Paddy took over the White Sox’s international operations for the 2012-13 class. Below that, you can read annual summaries of the successes, or lack thereof.
The information below is not 100 percent complete, and what’s there is probably not 100 percent accurate. It’s cobbled together from BA’s initial reports. If there’s no initial report, then we have to reverse engineer the signing.
For instance, Jose Rodriguez was not a signing of note for the White Sox, and didn’t surface even after an encouraging DSL season. But when he lit up the Arizona Rookie League and barged his way into MLB Pipeline’s Top 30 White Sox Prospects list, we now see that he signed for $50,000 in the 2017-18 class. But for other prospects who made equally belated but smaller impression, such information can remain elusive.
I intend to update this record between seasons and/or after signing class announcements (most recent update: Jan. 17, 2023). Should you find out-of-date or otherwise inaccurate information that’s beyond timing, let me know.
